We've reached that point that FDR warned us about, regardless of the word you use to describe it.
As Gilens and Page wrote for the Washington Post, explaining their research, "strong support among the affluent is associated with about a 25 point greater probability of a policy being adopted" while strong support among the middle-class is actually associated with a small decline in the likelihood that a policy will be adopted."
"In other words," they continued, "strong support among high-income Americans roughly doubles the probability that a policy will be adopted; strong support among the middle class has essentially no effect."
What Professors Gilens and Page documented is that the Supreme Court killed democracy in the United States. The will of the people -- the very definition of democracy -- no longer matters.
As a result, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) felt safe diverting billions of dollars that could have been used for maintenance or burying their high-tension lines into bloated executive salaries and fabulous shareholder dividends; after all, they owned or could strongly influence the majority of California politicians.
As Judge William Alsup ruled, "PG&E pumped out $4.5 billion in dividends and let the tree [trimming] budget wither."
Now they feel free to cut off people's power and tell San Francisco to go screw itself when it tried to buy their SF operations.
It's also why one of the largest purchasers of drugs in the U.S. -- Medicare -- is now barred by law (the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003) from negotiating prices for those drugs and must pay full retail for everything, a windfall worth hundreds of billions to the pharmaceutical companies.
This law, promoted by the Bush administration, was passed back in 2003 but is still on the books because the drug industry owns the majority of our federal politicians, even though 93 percent of Democratic and 74 percent of Republican voters agree that the government should be able to negotiate prices. In addition to being a Medicare-funded windfall for pharmaceutical CEOs, it has led to drug prices exploding across the board, and that has led to dying Americans.
Most Americans want clean air, pure water, and a healthy environment; every administration since Reagan has, instead, cut thousands of corners or even driven roadways through previous laws and regulations protecting us. The majority of Americans want affordable college, strong Social Security, and a livable minimum wage; instead, since 1980, the trend-lines have all been in the opposite direction.
Industry after industry has poured their largess into political coffers, and in nearly every case they get what they want, the voting public be damned.
Americans know this. It's one of the reasons why, when a buffoonish reality TV star and mobbed-up New York real estate mogul ran for president promising to "drain the swamp" and "break Washington," millions voted for him. But he's not giving us democracy, either; he's just accelerating the slide to a totally corporate-owned state.
When the five conservatives on the Supreme Court betrayed America by handing our political system over to the morbidly rich and corporations, the Reagan administration, bowing to newly empowered corporate pressure, stopped enforcing a century of anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws.
No administration since has felt the need to reverse that, as industry after industry -- from media to airlines to insurance to hotels to social media to food -- have become dominated by cartels of a small handful of companies.
At this scale, it's much easier to purchase and lead legislators, as we learned this week happened when it was revealed that last year a paid-off member of Congress slipped language into law written by or for Boeing that essentially put them in charge of FAA airworthiness certification. The result was the 737 Max and 346 dead human beings.
In the Democratic primaries, several candidates started backing away from Medicare for All when people from drug, hospital, doctor and insurance interests began to financially support their campaigns. The Republican Party sold their souls back in the 1980s; only about half of the Democratic Party is in a similar condition of servitude, which has put the party at a severe electoral disadvantage since that era.
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